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[English Literature 



^'St-d'''^r 



ELIZABETHAN 



AND 



JACOBEAN 



BY 

EDMUND GOSSE, LL.D. 



'J"V 



PHILADELPHIA 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 

1901 



.a4 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two C0PIE3 ReCEIVF.D 

NOV, 16 190? 

CopyRIQHT ENTRY 

CLASS cu XXc-, '^ ^ ■ 
I COPY D. I 



Copyright, 1901 
By J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 



ELIZABETHAN 



AND 



JACOBEAN LITERATURE 



It is growing to be more and more difficult, 
as knowledge becomes more exact, to find a gen- 
eral term by which to distinguish the magnifi- 
cent literature of England at the close of the 
sixteenth and the opening of the seventeenth cen- 
turies. It was customary in earlier times to call 
everything from Sackville to Shirley Elizabethan, 
and in common parlance the entire period of sixty 
or seventy years is still laxly termed the Eliza- 
bethan age. In point of fact, the adjectives 
' Elizabethan ' and ' Jacobean,' though con- 
venient, are misleading ; and the literary move- 
ment from 1558 to 1625 cannot be regarded 
with reference to political events. The date of 
Elizabeth's death, 1603, is a particularly incon- 
venient one to the student of literature, and 
divides the epoch of Shakespeare and Ben 
Jonson in a meaningless way. Nor is there 
anything which properly connects a writer like 
Gascoigne with a writer like Quarles. The 
proper way of regarding this intensely vivid and 
various age is, perhaps, to divide it into four 
periods of unequal length and value. But 
before we define these stages in the evolution 
of the Elizabethan-Jacobean history, we must 

3 



see where England stood among the peoples 
of Europe m 1558. 

Italy at that moment was still at the summit 
of the intellectual world, easily first among the 
nations for learning and literary accomplish- 
ment. But she was already closely pursued 
by France, and before the age we are consider- 
ing ended she was to be passed in the race by 
Spain and England. This, then, is to be noted, 
that we find Italian literature the first in Europe, 
and that we leave it the fourth ; the rapid, steady 
decline of Italy being a phenomenon of highest 
import in our general survey. But prestige 
lingers long after the creative faculty has passed 
away ; and the nations of Western Europe were 
still dazzled by the splendours of Italian poetry 
long after Italy had ceased to deserve homage. 
The chivalrous epic of Italy, with its tales 'of 
ladies dead and lovely knights,' whether entirely 
serious with Boiardo (i 434-1 494) and Ariosto 
(1474-1533), or tinged with burlesque humour 
with Pulci (1432-1487) and Berni (1497-1535), 
had been the last great gift of Italy to literature 
before she sank into her decline. The Orlando 
Furioso and the Morgante Maggiore set their 
stamp on European literature, and most of all 
on that of England. To note the influence of 
Ariosto on Spenser, in particular, is of the first 
critical importance. 

All these Italian poets, it will be observed, 
were dead when Elizabeth came to the throne. 
There succeeded to these great names nothing 
better than those of serio-comic poets of the 
third class, such as Tassoni and Bracciolini, 
although, during our own great age, the light 
of Italian poetry made another flicker in the 
socket with Guarini and with Torquato Tasso. 



If however, Italian verse was not any longer of 
commanding importance, Italian prose was so 
still less. Italy had possessed a noble school of 
political historians, but they had passed away 
before the middle of the sixteenth century. 
The novelists of manners, who exercised so 
important an influence on our drama, and on 
Shakespeare himself, belong to a period ante- 
cedent to the revival of English prose ; Ban- 
dello died in 1561, Cinthio in 1573; the Notti 
/^/<3:(ri?z;(?// was published in 1554. A blight fell 
upon Italian prose after the appearance of these 
novels. More curious still was the early attempt 
made, at first apparently with extraordinary suc- 
cess, to create an Italian drama. It was doomed 
to sudden and abject failure. In all things it 
seemed as though Italy, after the splendours of 
the Cinque Cento, was deliberately drawn into 
the background by Providence to make room 
for France, and for Spain, and most of all for 
England. 

If we turn to France, we find that by 1558 
the principles of the Italian Renaissance had 
been completely introduced among the young 
writers. The famous Defense et Illustration de 
la Langue Frangaise dates from 1549, and in 
its reformation of the language led to a parallel 
revival of literary forms and a return to natural 
poetic inspiration. The result had been an 
instant and extraordinary renovation of the 
essential French genius, dipped again in the 
waters of antiquity and transformed to youth 
and beauty. That France was ahead of Eng- 
land in her literary revival is easily exemplified 
by the fact that Joachim du Bellay, by whom 
the principles of that revival were illustrated 
with peculiar perfection and delicacy, died in 



1560, before Shakespeare and Marlowe were 
born. Ronsard, who lived to the confines of 
old age, died just six months after Shakespeare 
came of age. The creation of tragedy in France 
followed a little later, but it was coincident with 
the earliest years of Elizabeth, and the date of 
the Cleopdtre of Jodelle is 1552. The begin- 
nings of original comedy in France, with Grevin 
and Jean de la Taille, belong to the first decade 
of Elizabeth's reign. In all forms of imagina- 
tive revival France is seen to be about one 
generation ahead of us at this time. The same 
may be said of French prose in the hands of 
the writer who affected us most, namely, Mon- 
taigne (1533-1592). 

In Spain the reign of Philip II. (i 555-1 598) 
was so nearly coincident with that of Elizabeth 
that we can trace the literary parallel with some 
closeness. The following of Italian models is 
far more general in Spain than it is with us, but 
it takes a form which is a perfectly original one 
and native to the Peninsula, namely, the lyrico- 
mystical. In St Teresa (15 15-1582), St John 
of the Cross (San Juan de la Cruz, 1542-1591, 
abbot of the monastery of Ubeda, who was 
called ' the ecstatic doctor '), and Luis Ponce de 
Leon (152 7-1 591) we have poets of the tran- 
scendental order who were far ahead of any 
English writers of 1570 in vigour of diction and 
accomplishment of poetic art ; these lyrists were 
destined to exercise an intense, though limited, 
influence on our own poetry. The novel, 
picaresque or pastoral, was cultivated in Spain 
before it was transplanted to us. Montemayor, 
who died in 1561, is the direct inspirer of 
Sidney and the school of Greene. Moreover, 
in the days of Philip II. the drama found in 



Spain that acceptance which it had failed to 
find in Italy, and the life of Lope de Vega 
extends on both sides beyond the life 
of Shakespeare. Mr Fitzmaurice-Kelly has 
dwelt on the dramatic experiments of Encina 
(1468-1534), and we have nothing in English 
of the early sixteenth century to compare with 
his 'liturgical' dramas. The amazing tragi- 
comedy or dramatised novel of Calls to and 
Mellbea, by Rojas, dates from 1499, and is 
precisely on a level with what some Englishmen 
of like mind might have composed in 1599. 
We are not, however, to presume from this 
that England was all through the century a 
hundred years behind Spain, since there 
seems to have been made no further progress 
at all, in the novel or the drama, until the 
days of Cervantes and of Lope de Vega, who 
were exact contemporaries of Shakespeare 
and Spenser. 

We may therefore roughly say that, standing 
on the first year of the reign of Elizabeth, we 
see Italy, flushed and garlanded with triumphs, 
and taking as a matter of course her prestige of 
supremacy, practically unsuspicious of the fact 
that her vitality has left her, and that she is 
dwindling to the fourth rank among the nations. 
We see France, at this very instant of sudden 
revival and reconstitution of her literature, 
taking the principles of humanism with a sort 
of limpid innocence, like a child, amusing her- 
self by applying them to the outer surface of life 
and language, without troubling herself to see 
that they permeate into the veins of the race. 
France is in the heyday of her brief literary Age 
of Gold. Spain is the one country in Europe 
whose literary history at this moment resembles 



our own. Like ourselves, she has tardily ac- 
cepted the Renaissance ; the mediaeval strain 
has nearly worked itself out of her ; she is start- 
ing, or has started, each of the purely modern 
forms of literary expression. But, while Spain 
began her revival earlier than we did, she pro- 
gressed with it in far more dilatory fashion. In 
1558 we are still almost barbarous, while she 
looks back on Boscan and Garcilaso and 
Guevara; but Spain moves so slowly that by 
1588 we have caught her up, and before 1600 
we have passed her. 

For in 1588 there was little being produced 
or prepared that could have suggested to such 
a general observer as did not then exist in the 
world that we could pretend to anything better 
than the fourth place among the literary nations. 
If we give a brief consideration to the first of 
the four divisions of one period of which we 
have spoken above, the record it presents to us 
is mainly one of sterile turmoil and the irrita- 
bility of inexperience. From 1558 to 1570 we 
are told, indeed, that ' Minerva's men and finest 
wits ' swarmed like bees at the universities and 
the Inns of Court, but little honey resulted, and 
that neither sweet nor translucent. One great 
poetic genius, indeed, born out of his due time, 
and crushed (it would appear) by the absolute 
inability of his age to comprehend what he was 
doing, does appear in the form of Thomas 
Sackville, whose Induction^ a meteoric portent 
of a poem, not connected with any other in 
the generation, appeared in 1563 in the second 
edition of a dreary and antiquated verse-mis- 
cellany called A Mirror for Magistrates^ where 
its vivid modern note clashes astonishingly 
with the droning and mumbling measure of its 



fellows. As I have remarked elsewhere, a sign 
of the unhealthy condition of letters in this 
hectic generation is that, although it produced 
experiments in literature, it encouraged no 
literary man, and Sackville passed abruptly 
from us into politics and silence. Ascham, an 
opponent of the Italian influence, and the head 
of a school which had endeavoured to press 
upon Englishmen a crabbed Hellenism, stripped 
of all the elements of beauty, died in 1568, 
leaving us unconvinced of the value of his 
own scheme of humanism, yet suspicious of 
and unprepared for any other. Arthur Brooke, 
convinced to the finger-tips that salvation can 
only come from Italy, produces a poem worthy 
of more historical attention than we have 
been accustomed to give. Churchyard, Googe, 
Turberville, dull dogs without much to say or 
voice for singing, keep the level of accomplish- 
ment as low as they can ; while Ascham's 
theories about the classics lead to a great 
activity in the rendering of Greek and Latin 
classics into a horrible jargon that passes for 
the newest English. The year 1570 comes 
and goes, and English literature is still in 
doleful case. 

It is permissible, however, to take the some- 
what arbitrary date of the publication of the 
Bull of Excommunication by Pope Pius V. 
(April 25, 1570) as the opening of a new 
intellectual era in England. Elizabeth, not in 
the least daunted by her enemies, adopted an 
attitude of resolute isolation which gave con- 
fidence to her entire people. For the next ten 
years, by contrast with the distracted condition 
of Europe, the internal affairs of England were 
prosperous and tranquil, for the country had 



lO 



realised that it was face to face with an 
implacable foe, whom, nevertheless, by the 
exercise of patriotic virtue, it might confidently 
hope to defy. In this condition of exalted 
public feeling, under this pleasurable tension, 
these seeds of Renaissance culture, which had 
hitherto sent up such dwindled shoots into the 
English air, began to thrust forth an abundant 
harvest. The Bull of Deposition, which it was 
hoped by the Roman party would paralyse 
England, was a trumpet-blast calling upon all 
the slumbering forces of intelligence to waken 
and come forth. Hence the period from 1570 
to 1590 — the real and essential Elizabethan 
period — is one of the most vivid and exciting 
spaces of twenty years with which the student 
is called upon to deal in the whole history of 
letters. It rustles with growth, like a tropical 
forest in early summer. We find it difficult to 
take note of what is happening, so sudden and 
so manifold are the manifestations of originality. 
In the higher poetry, Spenser, still a school- 
boy, leads the chorus with his first lisping 
translations from Petrarch and Joachim du 
Bellay as early as 1569. But for the solitary 
voice of Sackville, calling twice in the wilder- 
ness, like a ghostly clarion, there had been 
none to point out the excellent way of modern 
English poetry since Surrey. But by this time 
some of the poets had at least reached the age 
at which independent impressions are formed 
and can be retained. In 1570 we may re- 
collect that Marlowe and Shakespeare were six 
years old, while Constable, Daniel, Drayton, 
Chapman, Greene, Lodge, Watson, and doubt- 
less Peele and Kyd were children of more or 
less observation and advancement. Some of 



II 



the great prose-writers of the next age were 
older still ; Raleigh was eighteen, Hooker and 
Sidney sixteen, Bacon nine. These were among 
the foremost of the names which were to make 
the closing years of the reign of Elizabeth 
illustrious. 

We may gain, perhaps, a useful idea of 
what took place within these twenty years if 
we glance for a moment at what had been 
accomplished at the close of them. In 1570 
there was no poetry of real value being com- 
posed in England ; in 1590 all the English 
world was reading the first three books of The 
Faerie Quee?i, in which romantic and allegorical 
narrative rose to a height which put us at 
once on a level with the Italy of Boiardo and 
Ariosto. In 1570 our prose was still inchoate, 
still cumbered with the dullness and stiffness, 
of medisevalism, still in the leading-strings of 
Latin and French models. By 1590 it had 
begun to produce, although still rather timidly, 
a crop of national and individual works. 
Euphues and the Arcadia were written ; there 
had grown up a school of writers of prose 
romances which were not without their promise. 
If, however, the revival of prose belongs to a 
still later period, one magnificent thing had 
been accomplished in these twenty years— the 
foundation of English drama. From the thin 
and stammering pseudo-classical plays of the 
beginning of Elizabeth's reign, from Ralph 
Roister Doister and TJw Supposes, to tragedy as 
created by Kyd and Marlowe, the transition is 
like that from deep night to full sunrise. With 
The Arraignment of Paris and Alexander and 
Campaspe (1584) England took her place 
among the drama-producing nations, but with 



12 



Tamburlaine the Great she indicated her in- 
tention of standing at their head for all 
remaining time. 

Nevertheless, it must be distinctly recognised 
that this second Elizabethan period, for all its 
warm fecundity, was in the main a period of 
preparation rather than fulfilment. The very 
type of it was George Gascoigne, who, without 
bequeathing to English literature a single work 
or even a single line which is now read with 
enjoyment, for its own sake, was an inno- 
vator of extraordinary ingenuity and versatility. 
Everything which was later on to be done 
well, every neglected instrument from which 
melody was presently to be extracted, was 
tested, was handled by Gascoigne without any 
considerable personal success. He died, as 
he arrived, too soon ; in 1577 the world of 
English fancy was not prepared for the multi- 
tudinous experiments of Gascoigne's mind. 
The author of his elegy, addressing his con- 
temporaries, cried, ' His scene is played ; you, 
follow on the act ! ' and this is precisely what 
the greatest of them did. He had written the 
first Greek play introduced upon the English 
stage, the first prose drama, the first criticism, 
the first satire, the first non-dramatic poem in 
blank verse. Gascoigne was but a servitor 
among the Elizabethans ; but he swept the 
floor, arranged the seats, and lighted the candles 
for the orchestra of magnificent performers 
which swept into their places when he had 
prematurely passed away. 

Almost the only department in which 
Gascoigne is not known to have essayed his 
pale experiments is that of prose fiction. This 
was started by numerous travelled Englishmen, 



13 

who had found delight in the Italian stories 
of the preceding century. Paynter's Palace of 
Pleasure (1566) in the very first years of 
Elizabeth's reign had alarmed sober and old- 
fashioned men by introducing tales by Bandello, 
Boccaccio, and even Straparola. This col- 
lection had contained, in its primitive form, 
the plot of Romeo and Juliet. A little later 
Englishmen attempted to emulate these romantic 
fictions by prose novels of their own ; the 
Promos and Cassandra (1578) of Gascoigne's 
friend Whetstone being the earliest of these 
' right excellent and famous histories, divided 
into comical discourses,' which can by any 
stretch of language be called a novel. Lyly's 
Euphues., a real addition to prose literature, and 
a milestone on the roadway of English style, 
dates from 1579; and it has been thought that 
the Don Simonides of Barnabe Rich (1581), 
containing ' strange and wonderful adventures ' 
and 'very pleasant discourse,' the whole 
'gathered for the recreation as well of our 
noble young gentlemen as of our honourable 
courtly ladies,' may be considered our earliest 
modern romance. 

Therefore it seemed probable that the revival 
in English composition would take the form of 
the novel. Certainly an impartial observer be- 
tween 1580 and 1590 would have been justified 
in supposing so. There came into existence a 
set of professional men of letters, who supplied 
the taste of the time with stories of extravagant 
adventure wrapped up in a curiously sophisti- 
cated moral disquisition. Greene began with 
Mamillia (1583), a long series of highly-coloured 
fantastic novels, 'love-pamphlets,' as he called 
them ; and he was immediately imitated by 



Lodge, by Dickenson, by Lode wick Lloyd, and 
by many others of less notoriety. These books 
had a peculiarity which is of the greatest im- 
portance : they were written for women. It was 
frequent to dedicate a novel of this class 'To 
the Gentlewomen of England ; ' Lyly went so 
far as to say that his books would 'rather lie 
shut in a lady's casket than open in a scholar's 
study.' This gave a peculiarly civilising effect 
to what was best in these romances, most 
of which, although they were objected to 
by the severe on account of their appeal to 
frivolity and their long-drawn pictures of lovers' 
emotion, were in no sense licentious or even 
coarse. 

This curious fashion, however, although intro- 
duced by a book so original, so wise, and in 
many ways so attractive as Euphues^ and although 
for a little while so triumphant, was doomed to 
rapid and complete failure. The romantic novel 
in Elizabethan England culminated in the Rosa- 
lynde of Lodge (1590), and we may admit the 
space of twelve years as comprising its rise and 
its decay. From the first it was exotic ; not 
one of the novels (with the curious excep- 
tion of Nash's realistic picaresque romance of 
Jack Wilton^ ^5945 from which an extract is 
given) touched the incidents of actual life. 
The landscape was a scene out of some vague, 
flowery Arcadia ; the personages were heroic 
beyond mortal comprehension ; the language 
used was almost invariably that artificial, 
mincing dialect suggested, as is now believed, 
by the study of the world-famous Reloj de 
Frincipes, or ' Dial of Princes, ' by the Spanish 
bishop, Antonio de Guevara (translated from 
a French version by Lord Berners, and again 



15 

by Sir Thomas North in 1557). This dialect 
took the name of Euphuism, though it ex- 
isted before the days of Euphues^ and indeed 
hangs Hke a faint scent of musk over most 
early Elizabethan prose. Discredited and ridi- 
culed, Euphuism was not only long in dying, 
but lived to impress indelibly the style of the 
greatest English writers of the next age, and 
Shakespeare himself. 

The novel was a rapidly deciduous growth 
thrown off to prepare the minds and tongues of 
Englishmen for an infinitely more important and 
more national literary manifestation. The exotic, 
artificial romance was not nearly strong enough 
meat for the appetites of men, or of women 
either, awakened to the gust of life at the close 
of the glorious Tudor epoch. In the extreme 
fermentation of public and private existence, 
the violence and intensity of passion experi- 
enced in real life easily and finally rendered 
insipid the flowery, languid stories of the 
Euphuists. When life moved so quickly, and 
presented people with such startling reverses of 
fortune ; when foreign politics, and home church- 
craft, and the bewilderment of infatuated love, 
and the intrepidity of murder, and a thousand 
other forms of passionate, ill-regulated vitality, 
were stirring the fantasy of the populace, so 
that life itself was more exciting than a thou- 
sand romances, it was impossible to be interested 
for any length of time in long, blossomy con- 
versations between the melancholy shepherd 
Menaphon and the fair nymph Samela of 
Cyprus. And out of this impatience grew the 
great literary invention of the Elizabethan age, 
the stage-play. 

We have already passed in review, in earlier 



i6 

divisions of this volume, the Tudor miracles and 
moralities which illustrated the theatrical spirit 
for men who had not been touched by the new 
learning. In these interesting but primitive 
compositions plot had been entirely wanting, 
and everything approaching to evolution of 
character. These plays had been humorous, 
sensible, and lively ; they had depended upon 
allegory for their interest ; and they had been 
independent of all exotic influence. In the 
first years of Elizabeth certain faint efforts had 
been made at creating a native comedy and a 
native tragedy, and these will be chronicled in 
their place. But the mediaeval play had to die 
before the Renaissance play could be created. 
According to an early legend, the boy Shake- 
speare went from his home to Coventry to 
watch a performance of the old pageant of 
Corpus Christi. It was the new world con- 
templating the old world, and between these 
two there was really no essential bond. The 
attempts made, therefore, to modernise the 
surface of the mediaeval play, and give it 
a humanist veneer, are of purely antiquarian 
interest. 

The first Renaissance English play belongs 
to a period earlier than that with which this 
division deals. Nor was Ralph Roister Doister 
a farce on English lines at all, but founded 
almost servilely on a classical model. There 
were several successors to Udall's clever adap- 
tation of the manner of Plautus, but none of 
them led any farther in the development of 
comedy. In tragedy the same process was re- 
peated, under a worse model, the so-called 
Seneca. The interest taken in this bombastic 
Latin tragedy in the early years of Elizabeth 



17 

was very remarkable, and culminated in the pro" 
duction of Gorbuduc of Sackville and Norton, 
first performed in 1562. The irrational character 
of these dramatic experiments, and the fact that 
they led nowhere, and were incapable of de- 
velopment and exterision, struck contemporary 
minds after a quarter of a century of bewildered 
subjection to Seneca. The most advanced 
critic to-day could scarcely define the faults of 
an early Elizabethan dramatist better than 
Whetstone did (in 1578) when he declared him 
to be ' most vain, indiscreet, and out of order ; 
he first grounds his work on impossibilities ; 
then in three hours runs he through the world ; 
marries, gets children ; makes children men, 
men to conquer kingdoms, murder monsters ; 
and bringeth gods from heaven, and fetcheth 
devils from hell.' 

What delayed the wholesome revival of the 
modern drama in England was the persistence 
with which the university wits, such as Sidney, 
Harvey, and Gosson, determined that this inco- 
herence could only be abated by a stricter 
adherence to classical rules of composition. 
Their great mistake was to regard the drama as 
a purely intellectual or literary thing, without 
taking into consideration the material require- 
ments of an audience in a theatre. But, while 
the scholars were wrangling in their closets as 
to the proper way in which the precepts of 
Aristotle should be carried out, the common 
people, who had never heard of Aristotle or of 
the unities, but who desired to be amused and 
alarmed in commodious play-houses, on their 
own lines, with intelligible chronicle-plays and 
farces, were really preparing the foundations of 
a national drama. Hence, in discussing the 



i8 

movement of our dramatic literature, it is im- 
possible to escape from a subject not properly 
dealt with in this volume, nameTy, the history 
of the stage, or to decline to acknowledge the 
importance of the date 1576, as that of the 
year in which the great building of advanced 
suburban theatres began. 

We are here, however, confronted by the 
extremely curious fact that it seems impossible 
for us to discover what happened in the English 
theatrical world between this date and 1587. 
In spite of endless research and conjecture, these 
ten years, the conduct of which would be of 
extraordinary interest to us, obstinately refuse to 
deliver up their dramatic secrets. It is certain 
that several of the court-plays of Lyly, curious 
anomalies in stage-craft, which faintly prophesied 
of the poetic comedy of the next age, were per- 
formed ; and it is also certain that one play of 
real merit, in its fragmentary way, The Arraign- 
ment of Paris, by George Peele, was played in 
1584 by the Children of the Chapel Royal before 
Queen Elizabeth. Robert Greene, afterwards 
so famous, in these years 'left the University 
[of Cambridge] and away to London, where [he] 
became an author of plays.' But these early 
dramas of Greene have, without exception, 
perished or vanished. Perhaps the play of 
Sir Clyomon and Sir Clamydes, a strange medley 
of mediaeval and Hellenic romance, belongs to 
this same dim period of transition. Putting 
together these and what other scraps of evi- 
dence we possess, we come to the conclusion 
that in these years, from 1576 to 1587, there 
was a tendency to the employment of Euphuism 
on the stage, to an avoidance of serious passion ; 
that there was preferred the use of rhyming 



19 

metres, blank verse still lacking the sonority 
desirable for the public stage ; that no attention 
was seriously given to characterisation or con- 
struction, the two qualities upon which drama 
really depends ; and that for all these reasons 
there was a suspended animation, the English 
drama being unable to start, although absolutely 
ready to do so, until some man or men should 
arise strong enough to sweep these obstacles 
out of her path. 

It seems quite certain that neither Peele nor 
Lyly, though each had a graceful talent, was 
man enough to do this ; and what Greene was 
doing when he was not penning love-pamphlets 
is so absolutely unknown to us that conjecture 
is idle. But the revolutionary qualities wanted 
were unquestionably met with in two men of 
extraordinary fertility of invention and resolute 
originality — Kyd and Marlowe. Of these Mar- 
lowe had doubtless the greater genius ; the tra- 
dition of the seventeenth century, combined 
with very recent discoveries, leads us to suspect 
that Kyd was the more innovating spirit. The 
fault of allegorical pastorals like Endymion and 
The Arraignment of Paris was that they were too 
gentle ; they merely brushed the surface of life. 
These were social entertainments, in which politi- 
cal and courtly complications were touched with 
so timid a hand that if the official world turned 
upon the poet he might say that he did not 
mean anything at all, and that the resem- 
blance was accidental. But such plays ill- 
matched the deep excitement, the audacious 
keenness, of the maturing Elizabethan age ; and 
therefore we see, in 1587, two dramatists, sup- 
ported unquestionably by their strong personal 
friendship, rise like Harmodius and Aristogeiton 



20 



to free English drama by an unexpected death- 
blow from the tyranny of a paralysing conven- 
tionality. 

The blow was struck by Marlowe in Dr 
Faustus and by Kyd in The Spanish Tragedy. 
But to comprehend the nature of the revolution 
worked by these two men we must realise what 
their personal relations were with their time. 
It wanted but a little that these twin planets of 
our dramatic dawn were burned at the stake 
for their atheistical and infamous opinions ; 
they were in actual danger of a death as violent 
as any which they drew. One of them actually 
died by the hand of a murderer, and both were, 
in their brief, fiery, and tempestuous lives, the 
prototypes of the melodramatic villains of their 
own tragedies. Neither Kyd nor Marlowe shrank 
from the contemplation (we must not say the 
committal) in real life of those ' carnal, bloody, 
and unnatural acts ' which they loved to describe. 
If the character of Faustus fascinated them, it 
was because they saw in him what they wished 
to be — a turbulent innovator, self-supported in a 
paroxysm of intellectual arrogance and revolt. 
These new authors, in addition to the startling 
frankness with which they voiced the pride of 
the age, each possessed one dramatic quality 
of the highest and most pregnant value. Kyd 
had discovered the secret of the evolution of a 
plot ; Marlowe invented the sonorous fullness of 
an effective stage blank verse. These two things 
had but to be united, and tragedy was on the 
right road. The same year, 1587 (it is prob- 
able), saw the first working out of the story of 
Hamlet in a popular Senecan form, due, almost 
certainly, to Kyd. We incur little danger of 
mistake, indeed, if we take that date as the 



21 



practical start-year of drama in its finished form 
in England. It is worthy of note that, while 
tragedy is thus taking hold of the English 
mind in deep romantic intensity, it is fading 
from the stage of France, where it seemed 
to be so passionately welcomed. Before Mar- 
lowe and Kyd are vocal, Jodelle and Gamier 
(with whom Kyd had much in common) have 
quitted the stage, and have left no direct 
descendants. 

If we turn to narrative and lyrical poetry, we 
do not find the same abrupt transitions as meet 
us in the history of drama, but we observe a 
rapid upward development. Oddly enough, the 
period is limited, at its beginning and its close, 
by a publication of Spenser — The Shepherd's 
Calendar in 1579, and the first three books of 
The Faerie Queen in 1590. As will in due 
course be shown, Spenser himself almost wholly 
disappears from our view during those years ; 
but the progress of poetry, set in action by the 
startling novelties of The Shepherds Calendar^ 
continues. Sidney's friendship wdth Spenser, 
and his presidency of the 'Areopagus,' a sort 
of club which set out to revolutionise poetry 
in a wholly undesirable way, dates from a year 
or so earlier than this ; and Sidney, in defiance 
of his own rules, begins to write the canzonets 
and pastoral odes of the Arcadia^ and, what is 
much more to the point, to introduce the 
sonnet and celebrate the alembicated loves 
of Astrophel and Stella. But these poems are 
not seen by the general public, and a profound 
sensation is made by Thomas Watson, whose 
Hecatonipathia^ or Passionate Centurie of Love^ 
is published in 1582. Watson has, perhaps, 
not left behind him a single poem, a single 



22 



line, which Hves in EngHsh Hterature ; yet his 

historical position is a very prominent one. 

He marks the disappearance of the last traces 

of mediaevalism, and the completion of the 

triumph of southern influences. Watson is a 

Petrarchist of the late order, of the class of 

Bembo and Molza, and of his sonnets may be 

said what Dr Garnett has excellently remarked 

of those of the last-mentioned Italian, that they 

are ' as inexpressive as harmonious — a perpetual 

silvery chime which soothes the ear, but conveys 

nothing to the mind.' 

It was, in all probability, a very propitious 

thing for English poetry that the Italian verse 

of the Cinque Cento declined so suddenly and 

lost its prestige so completely. The Petrarchists, 

after the brilliant success of their innumerable 

warblings, ceased to sing, or ceased to find 

listeners, in the middle of the century ; the 

latest and perhaps the best of them, Bernardo 

Tasso and Luigi Tansillo, died in 1568-69. 

There was, therefore, no contemporary Italian, 

of their own exact class, before whom Sidney 

and Watson were tempted to bow down. The 

most they could do was to become the English 

Tansillo and Molza of a later age. In spite of 

the weakness of their cause, their success was 

considerable. It must not be overlooked that 

a strong chord of Petrarchism continued to 

run through the complicated music of the 

great Elizabethan period, and was not' drowned 

until it melted into the grotesque melody 

of the disciples of Donne. Drayton, Daniel, 

Barnfield, even Shakespeare himself, are full of 

Petrarchism, and it is only proper to remember 

that all this was started and given direction 

to by Sidney and Watson, but by Watson most 

of all. 

LofC. 



23 

By the side of the Petrarchan there flourished 
the pastoral manner, borrowed from Italy and 
the Peninsula. One of the books of the Cinque 
Cento which most deeply influenced the litera- 
ture of the world, and not least of England, 
was the Arcadia of Sannazaro (1504), a pastoral 
romance, written in careful, but not Euphuistic, 
prose, plentifully besprinkled with bucolic verse. 
This work positively fascinated the youth of 
Europe, and was imitated, to satiety and ridi- 
cule, in every language. The Portuguese, in 
particular, greatly delighted in it, and it was 
a poet of Portugal, Jorge de Montemayor, 
whose Castilian pastoral of the Diafia (1558) 
awakened in the youthful Sidney the ambition 
to compete in English pastoral with the poets 
of Southern Europe. Sidney had imitated 
Montemayor and Sannazaro before these poets 
were widely known in England ; a version of 
the Diana (1598), by Bartholomew Young, 
acquired great popularity. Pastoral was started 
in England in two species — the Virgilian and 
Chaucerian, mingled in a kind of national 
eclogue, by Spenser, the purely artificial and 
Sannazaran by Sidney — and this also had its 
vogue throughout the next half-century, as 
exemplified in the direct scholars of Spenser, 
such as Phineas Fletcher and Browne, and in 
the more voluptuous dramatists from Beaumont 
to Shirley. 

One prominent section of literature remains 
to be spoken of, and that is prose. But here 
we find much less to be said of a definite kind. 
The great years from 1570 to 1590 were years 
of national concentration on the difficult and 
supremely fascinating art of verse, and very 
secondary and desultory attention was given to 



24 

pedestrian prose. Of late what is perhaps an 
exaggerated attention has been given to the 
useful and picturesque but prolix translations 
of the early Elizabethan age. Sir Thomas 
North, Philemon Holland, Savile, and the rest 
have their place in the development of prose, 
but they were awkward writers, rocking fever- 
ishly between a vulgar raciness and an inappro- 
priate pomposity of language. In Lyly, for 
the first time, we meet with an English writer 
of measured and occasionally elegant prose, 
although even Lyly is painfully prolix and 
mannered. In Hooker, for the first time, we 
discover really competent and practical prose, 
capable of conducting an argument with sanity, 
lucidity, and dignity ; but Hooker published 
nothing until 1594. Much of the practical 
prose of the early Elizabethan is energetic, and 
it is possible from a dozen writers to select 
brief passages of extreme magnificence ; but it 
is difficult to perceive that they wrote upon any 
system, or that it had ever crossed their minds 
that prose should be given, and could deserve, 
no less sustained technical attention than verse 
itself. After 1590 there came a burst of 
geographical and adventurous prose, much of 
which makes exceedingly good reading to-day. 
Nothing is more delightful than to plunge into 
those miscellanies in which Hakluyt and after- 
wards Purchas preserved the ' memorable ex- 
ploits of late years by our English nation 
achieved, from the greedy and devouring jaws 
of oblivion.' Most of all, the progress of 
biblical and liturgical prose deserves our careful 
attention, the Bishops' Bible of Parker (1568) 
being the companion of men who gradually 
became dissatisfied with its imperfections, and 



25 

demanded from the Conference of 1604 
a revision of the EngHsh Scriptures, which 
led, in 161 1, to the pubUcation of a Bible 
the most faultless and the most melodiously 
picturesque to be found in any European ver- 
nacular. For the success of this crowning 
trophy of Jacobean genius praise must not 
be withheld from Lancelot Andrewes, the editor 
or chairman of James I.'s learned committee of 
ecclesiastics. 

We have now indicated a few of the influ- 
ences and the surroundings which moulded 
English imaginative thoughts in the days which 
preceded the magnificent burst of genius in 
the midst of which the voice of Shakespeare 
was raised. When the creators were at work, 
simultaneously building the vast palaces of 
Elizabethan poetry, it became difficult to re- 
collect the very names of their predecessors. It 
has therefore seemed well that we should linger 
a little on the movement of those gentle forces 
which led up to the great explosion of genius, 
in order to prepare readers for the pheno- 
mena which will be presented to them in due 
chronological course. From 1591 to 16 16 — 
that is to say, during the quarter of a century 
peculiarly identified with the activity of Shake- 
speare — English literature was raised to an ex- 
traordinary height of splendour and originality, 
and this must now be studied in the detailed 
life of its individual exponents. 

One general order of ideas may, however, be 
suggested. Without giving way to the tendency 
to see historical events immediately reflected in 
literary productions, we may yet perceive to 
advantage the many ways in which Elizabethan 
literature proceeded on lines continuous with 



26 

those worked along by the great Tudor statesmen. 
First of all, it is impossible not to be struck by 
the contributions to the sentiments of national 
independence offered by one great author after 
another. There was this difference between, 
let us say, the polished epics of Italy and The 
Faerie Queen, that the one represented a vain 
aspiration and the other a living entity. When 
Spenser drew a picture of that newly-invented 
paragon of chivalry, the English gentleman, he 
painted something at once more attractive and 
more romantic than Orlando or Rinaldo had 
proved on the realistic canvas of Boiardo. But 
while he seemed, with his allegory and his 
fabulous geography, to be farther from exist- 
ence than the southerners, he was actually 
moving much nearer to it, because he presented 
the veritable sentiment of the English cham- 
pions who surrounded the virgin Gloriana on 
her throne. 

The literature of this magnificent period, in 
its pride of mien and audacity of purpose, seems 
to support the prerogative of the English Crown. 
It is the literature of a nation that has just 
awakened to a sense of its strength, its isola- 
tion, its almost insupportable inward perti- 
nacity. With the sudden development of 
political independence, there came an appre- 
hension of the necessity of intellectual and 
spiritual cultivation. Every accomplishment 
helped to make England great, and while the 
Italian laboured at high astronomy or was 
martyred in the cause of ethical speculation 
without a spark of national enthusiasm, the 
Elizabethan turned his little copy of verses or 
practised an air on the theorbo with the belief 
that England would be so far the richer for 



27 



his energy. The courtier, the speculator, the 
soldier, the poet, the adventurer on perilous 
seas, the patient and responsible public servant, 
were found united in a single personage in 
these * spacious ' times. The careers of men 
like Raleigh and Sidney appeal to us all ; but 
those of Fulke Greville, of John Davies, of 
Sackville, may teach us still more of this devo- 
tion to the day's service, be it what it may ; of 
this noble determination to do well whatever 
England may call a man to do, be it succes- 
sively the task of a poet, a diplomatist, a mem- 
ber of Parliament, a lawyer, a financier, or a 
soldier. 

It would be absurd, however, to pretend that 
Elizabethan literature was sustained at these 
crystal heights. Spenser and Shakespeare 
exemplify the chivalrous aspect at its best ; 
we shall discover little chivalry in Marston and 
Joseph Hall. Yet even in the grossest and 
most turbid of the Elizabethans we find abun- 
dance of that energy and intensity which are 
the signs of life and youth, and their faults are 
those out of which a great nation grows into 
serenity and strength. If the playwrights were 
coarse and rough, they were at least rough with 
the crudity of a full-bodied vintage, a wine that 
suffers in its youth for the stoutness and vigour 
of its quality. This is quite another thing from 
the malady of morals which falls on a feeble 
and decaying people, and which is like the 
flatness of a thin, indifferent vintage kept too 
long. In the general fusion of forces which 
took place in the reign of Elizabeth, a certain 
confused violence could not fail to be a 
symptom, in literature as well as in politics 
and Church matters. Life suddenly began to 



28 

be many-sided and copious, and elements of 
turbidity were inevitable in so tumultuous a 
torrent of thought. 

The reader of the following pages will be 
able to appreciate what were the main imaginative 
forms taken by this redundancy and ebullience 
of national sentiment. If he passes suddenly 
from 1591 to 161 6, which we take as the close 
of our third period, he will be surprised at the 
change he encounters. At the first date the 
world was opening before the inexperienced 
poet ; at the second, all experiments have been 
tried, all heights reached in the summer of 
English poetry, and the faintest breath of 
autumnal sadness is felt in the air. We left 
Raleigh dreaming of Guiana ; we find Ben 
Jonson and Donne blushing to remember their 
marriage odes on Somerset's hideous wedding. 
The man of the moment is Bacon ; the Spanish 
Marriage fills the air ; Shakespeare is dying, 
and Beaumont ; Fletcher's dramatic art has 
already become a formula ; the school of 
Spenser has sunk into silence. Everywhere 
there is a sense of the meridian being passed ; 
in literature, as in politics, the high rapture 
cannot be sustained, and the independence of 
a people is no sooner broadly established than 
it begins to cultivate the weaknesses of other 
settled nations. 

In nine years more, at the death of James I. 
in 1625, what we permitted ourselves to sus- 
pect has become matter of patent observation. 
Everywhere the symptoms of decay and decline 
are obvious. Bacon is degraded, and dying ; 
and no one takes his place. Ben Jonson is 
paralysed, and 'sick and sad,' and his 'sons in 
Apollo ' have not a tithe of his genius. Fletcher 



29 

is dead, and his work descends to Massinger. 
Of the glorious romantic poets which had made 
London the capital of Parnassus, the weary 
Heywood is still hanging about the stage, 
Middleton is closing appropriately in Afiythtng 
for a Quiet Life, and with Ford and Shirley 
in a little mom.entary revival, a martin's summer, 
is preparing England for a long period of 
darkness. In all this we trace nothing more 
nor less than the collapse of energy which 
answers in the history of the imagination of a 
people to nervous exhaustion in an individual. 
England was tired of her rapture, her tran- 
scendent effort, and she was ready to sink into 
the repose of a convention. 

We may, perhaps, discover a further reason 
for the malady which begins to afflict her from 
the reign of James I. onwards to the end of the 
Commonwealth. One palpable cause of the 
neglect of letters has been always pointed out in 
the confusion of political issues, and the concen- 
tration of popular attention on vast constitutional 
problems. But this easy solution of the diffi- 
culty is not to be accepted without a protest. 
In the first place, the decline of literature was 
proceeding at full speed while the political 
world was still quiet, and when none but the 
most far-sighted patriots anticipated a grand 
upheaval. On the other hand, it is by no 
means certain that an eager interest in high 
matters of State is necessarily unfavourable to 
the production of literature. The ecclesiastical 
storms which led to the appointment of Eliza- 
beth's High Commission swept through ever}' 
household in England, but their violence and 
bluster did not brush a grain of jewel-dust off 
the wings of The Faerie Queen, or delay by an 



30 

hour the evolution of the genius of Shakespeare. 
Nor is it at all certain that the disturbed con- 
dition of English politics half a century later 
had any ill effect on the imagination of Milton. 
We have to beware of attributing to politics too 
direct an influence on the waxing and waning 
of poetical literature. 

When we close the brilliant and unparalleled 
period the examination of which we are now 
about to commence, what we do find is that 
England did not escape that curious blight or 
malady of the mind w^hich fell on every other 
part of Europe, and marked, in so doing, the 
close of the Renaissance. This was the pre- 
occupation with a forced ingenuity of fancy 
which is known by so many names, and which 
affected so many literatures in different but 
contemporary ways, as in Donne with us, 
Marino with the Italians, Gongora with the 
Spaniards. In this a morbid horror of the 
obvious leads the writer into forms of thought 
and speech which are inelegant and non-natural, 
and in which the proportion between what is 
essential and what is trifling is lost. It is not 
quite exact to say that this change consisted in 
a decay of taste, because ugly and monstrous 
things had been written, with an almost in- 
nocent nonchalance, by the poets of the great 
period, while those of the decline were often 
prettier and more graceful in trifles than their 
masters had been. But there was a decay of 
the sense of relative values, and this we see 
exemplified in the works of a man of such 
amazing genius and force as Donne, who says 
the most penetrating and the most silly thing 
at the same moment, not (as it would appear) 
distinguishing what is silly from what is pene- 



31 

trating, and haviixg no criterion by which to 
judge his creations. 

So that, without paradox, we may say that 
what this period of our literary history did, in 
its excessive and volcanic strain of production, 
was to wear out and paralyse those faculties 
by which it held its own acts in the balance. 
It lost the sense of proportion, the power of 
parallel measurement, so that it stumbled and 
fell, as those do who by some affection of the 
nerves have lost the power of regulating their 
actions. What was left for further generations, 
then, to do was to recover the measuring and 
weighing power by means of a strict and tonic 
mental discipline. And it is thus, and thus 
alone, that we can comprehend the readiness 
with which those whose childhood had been 
spent in the light of Spenser and Shakespeare 
were willing to subject themselves to the 
Aristotelian rules and the versification of Waller 
and Denham. It was that the blaze and blare 
of Elizabethan genius had worn out their 
capacities of enjoyment, and they had to sub- 
ject themselves to a system of intellectual 
discipline to recover their mental tone. 



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